JAZOON 2008, Day 1

The first day @ JAZOON is complete!

The opening session.

• At the talk called The Challenge of Scalable Languages, Martin Odersky (the creator of Scala) was talking mainly about Scala language and how does it relates to Java. Explaining some of the design decisions for Scala (at last, I've got the answer for the silly declaration construct in Scala, i.e. var x: Int). There are many nice features in Scala I think. But I do not really understand why the operator overloading is brought in again?! Operator overloading was the feature that Java designers wanted to get rid of after C++, because when you read the A+B you cannot be sure weather the operands are really numbers.
  
  


• Simon Phipps was talking about The Adoption-Led Market. He started with Sun's relation to open-source, continuing with open-source history and licensing. This was a good talk with a lot of funny stuff in it. The only question to Sun is that if Sun is so opened to open-source software, why did to closed the source of MySQL engine??
  
  


• Next, Rod Johnson expressed a lot of criticism in respect to J2EE, JCP, etc in his talk Where will Tomorrow's Innovation Come From in Enterprise Java. For sure, he didn't forget to mention the Spring Application Platform :)
  
  

Next, Dmitri Buzdin was talking about his experiences with GWT adoption. I piked up that there are some difficulties with GWT, specially for developers who have less experience.

Against all odds - efficient Rich GUI development in Java. This was a talk about the rich UI development for a company called APG that is dealing with billboarding. The current solution was implementing Oracle Forms technology and as Forms is being deprecated, they decided to implement the rich client in Java with Swing.
So basically they were talking about the rewrite of UI without touching the back-end. As the result there's the direct connection from client to the database. I'm not sure how scalable new solution is, but the technology used for implementation is what amazed me the most. The UI is being generated based on meta-data described with some DSL. The framework used for this is the openArchitectureWare. The guys were claiming that this way they increased the development speed compared to the Oracle Forms. I think that the complete solution is a real crap. I can tell why. First, while the demo failed, they showed us the code - it was half-german, half-english code there, i.e. some methods were named in German which I think is a rally bad practice. Secondly, the technology stack which lead from the specification to the implementation is very unclear: if there will be an error, the application developer will be seeking for the problem all the day long instead of writing the real code. And last but not least, they did not finalize the project yet, so it was a little bit too early to talk about its success. I think even if the project gets finalized, if future the cost of maintaining this piece of software will be inadequate.
Perhaps I'm too rude in expressing my opinion to the solution some people may think is really good. May be it is just that I do not understand the MDA really well. So probably I'll take a look at it if it happens that I have nothing else to do :)

AJAX Push for Revolutionary Enterprise Applications presented by Micha Kiener (mimacom ag) and Ted Goddard (ICEsoft Technologies Inc.) was a nice presentation I enjoyed. The technology presented is quite innovative and it looks like pushing a new wave in the area of Web 2.0 application development. The keywords: Ajax Push, Comet, "Reverse Ajax", ICEFaces, Edoras, Servlet 3.0.